Michael White was voted Britain’s least boring music critic by listeners of Classic FM. He has made documentaries about Menotti, Britten and Nielsen and once attempted to explain Wagner's Ring Cycle on TV in half an hour. He's the author of two books: Introducing Wagner (Icon) and Opera & Operetta (HarperCollins).

Screaming camp at the Innsbruck Early Music Festival

We all know that the parameters of so-called ‘early’ music have shifted with time, creeping toward what you’d more properly call ‘later’ music, but I did think that the underlying performance objective of getting as close as possible to the composer’s original intention was a constant. And I carried on thinking so until I went this week to the Innsbruck Early Music Festival, which suggested otherwise.

Innsbruck is a pukka festival that draws artists with big reputations on the mainland European circuit. But that they’re not always the artists we know best in Britain makes it a learning experience for someone from the UK: an open-door on different people making different sounds with different attitudes. And just how different was clear from various shows I saw there – some of them in fact involving British instrumentalists or singers but subsumed into a mainland European ethos.

One was actually British repertoire: a back-to-back staging of John Blow’s Venus and Adonis with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas which attempted to weave the two stories together and did so on the challengeable grounds that both pieces were written contemporaneously as court entertainments for Charles II.

I’m not sure I was convinced by this interweaving, which at one point had Venus and Dido as competing partners for the same man, but it was a nice try by the multi-talented singer-turned-director Laurence Dale. And though it was too camp for my puritan sensibilities (screaming is the word that springs to mind), someone must have had a lot of fun making the costumes – cheerfully fetish-themed with zips, chains, rubber gas-masks, and allusions to the kind of discipline-wear favoured by Madonna.

Musically it was a joy as well, with bright young singers from the festival’s baroque training academy who weren’t always finished voices but had potential – most obviously in the case of English countertenor Jake Arditti, who made a decidedly up-for-it Cupid committed to sexual diversity, and Natalia Kawalek-Plewniak whose Dido initially struck me as pinched but then transformed into a reading of such striking individuality it was like no other I’ve experienced: distinctive, memorable and moving.

But the clearest expression of a shift away from that (as I thought) constant in period performance of trying to establish how it was for the composer came with a production of Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito that brazenly abandoned some of Mozart’s vocal numbers and replaced them with alternatives by subsequent composers – Joseph Wiegl, Johann Simon Mayr – written for stagings in the 1800s. The result was certainly historical but not original; and I can’t pretend that the substitutions were an improvement on what they replaced, because they weren’t. But as experiments they had some passing interest – with more to commend them than the conductor Alessando De Marchi’s other big idea, which was to accompany the recits with only string sound and no keyboard.

His argument was that this is how they’d have been done in those 1800s performances in smaller theatres where there would have been no keyboard instrument. Which may be true. But the result lacked definition, clarity and pace. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t see the point of it – although there was a lot of point to other things De Marchi did here. Using his own band Academia Montis Regalis with a dramatically stiff but musically superb attendant chorus, he delivered strength of purpose with the lightest touch. And fruity, soulful textures of a kind that British period bands tend not to do.

Kate Aldridge was a warm and rather lovely Sesto, Nina Bernsteiner a powerful Vitelia (whose shaving-brush hair set the tone for her uncertain sanity). As for the Tito (Carlo Allemano) I’m not sure how sane this staging by Christoph von Bernuth made him out to be: wearing a paper crown and governing his empire from a 25x life-size kitchen chair, he seemed a cartoon king whose motivation for the serial forgiveness Mozart’s opera is about (assault him, spurn him, burn his house down, he forgives you) could be simple absent-mindedness.

But motivation never was Clemenza’s greatest strength as theatre. Early on in Bernuth’s staging there appeared to be an interesting new possibility – that Tito’s lack of anger for his various would-be wives and obvious interest in his male friend Sesto is because he’s gay. Which would explain why Sesto gets forgiven come what may. But having, as I thought, promoted this idea, the staging didn’t push it further. Maybe I was just imagining the whole thing?